LA MORENITA, Chapter 5

The next day when Araceli came home from school, she couldn’t believe what she saw. Chad and Maria were in the back yard. Chad was bundled up in the stroller playing by himself while Maria was dumping the audio cassettes from an old shoe box into the garbage can. “What are you doing, Mama?” Araceli asked.
“Throwing stuff away,” her mother said.
Araceli peeked inside the garbage can and recognized the new trash. “Aren’t those the songs from El Ranchito? Why are you doing that?”
“We’re Americans, Araceli. We don’t need these.”
Inside the trash can, Araceli’s favorite songs shared space with flies, maggots, empty food jars, old cartons, potato peelings, grease, and black plastic bags filled with rotting garbage. One of the bags had split open, and some of the cassettes were half-submerged in coffee grounds, leftover mashed potatoes, and congealed fat.
“Come on,” Maria said. “We’re going inside.”
Araceli followed as Maria hoisted Chad up the back stairs.
Inside the house, Araceli asked her mother what they were going to do that day.
“Nothing,” Maria replied. “I’m not feeling well. I’m going to lie down for a while. You find something good for your brother to watch on T.V. Make sure he’s all right until I get up from my nap.”
Araceli pulled up on the cushioned board behind Chad’s head, raising him to a level where he could see the television. When he was sitting almost straight up, she jiggled the board until she felt the bar behind the board catch into a groove that secured it. She turned on the television, and surfed with the remote control until she found a station showing The Adventures of Scooby Doo. Chad laughed and clapped his hands as he saw the talking dog and his human sidekicks being chased through a haunted house by a glowering green goblin. Araceli sat next to her brother and watched as his eyelids slowly lowered like a flag descending on a pole at sunset. When he had closed his eyes completely, she waited another few minutes. Then she stepped furtively out of the back door. She went to the garbage can and fished out as many tapes as she could. She put these in the old shoe box her mother had dropped next to the garbage can and went back inside. She went into her room, put the shoe box in the bottom of her toy chest, and covered them with toys, dolls and old coloring books.
Four hours later, her mother came into her room and sniffed. “What’s that smell?” she asked.
“What smell?” Araceli said, although the instant her mother said it, she smelled it too. Maria stood in front of the toy box and looked around. Araceli sucked in her breath, fearing her mother would discover the cassette tapes.
“I told you not to bring any food in here, Araceli,” Maria said. “I want you to come out and eat supper with Chad and me. When supper’s over, I expect you to clean up your room. That means finding and dumping out all the spoiled food and bringing all the dishes, forks and spoons out to the kitchen and wash them with the rest of the dishes, do you hear me?”
Araceli exhaled. “Yes, Mama.”
The next day, while her mother slept, Araceli cleaned the cassettes and played them at the lowest volume setting on her portable tape player. Some weren’t playable, but she succeeded in saving the tapes that contained Duerma, Negrito, Mariposa, and Canta al Agua. These, plus the tapes that contained Mexican polkas, made four good tapes in all.